Harry wanted to touch it, to find out what it felt like, but nearly four years experience of the magical world told him that sticking his hand into a bowl full of some unknown substance was a very stupid thing to do. He therefore pulled his wand out of the inside of his robes, cast a nervous look around the office, looked back at the contents of the basin, and prodded them. The surface of the silvery stuff inside the basin began to swirl very fast.

Both of them bent closer, their heads right inside the cabinet. The silvery substance had become transparent; it looked like glass. They looked down into it, expecting to see the stone bottom of the basin - and saw instead an enormous room below the surface of the mysterious substance, a room into which they seemed to be looking through a circular window in the ceiling.

The room was dimly lit; Harry thought it might even be underground, for there were no windows, merely torches in brackets such as the ones that illuminated the walls of Hogwarts. Lowering his face so that his nose was a mere inch away from the glassy substance, Harry saw that rows and rows of witches and wizards were sat around every wall on what seemed to be benches rising in levels. An empty chair stood in the very centre of the room. There was something about the chair that gave Harry an ominous feeling. Chains encircled the arms of it, as though its occupants were usually tied to it.

Where was this place, Antheia wondered. It surely wasn't Hogwarts; she had never seen a room like that here in the castle. Moreover, the crowd in the mysterious room at the bottom of the basin was composed of adults, and Antheia knew there were not nearly that many teachers at Hogwarts. They seemed, she thought, to be waiting for something; even though she could only see the tops of their pointed hats, they all seemed to be facing in one direction, and nobody was talking to anybody else.

The basin being circular, and the room they were observing square, Harry could not make out what was going on in the corners of it. So, they leant even closer, tilting their heads slightly, trying to see ...

The tip of their noses touched the strange substance into which they were staring.

Dumbledore's office gave an almighty lurch - they were thrown forwards and pitched head first into the substance inside the basin -

But their heads did not hit the stone bottom. They were falling through something icy cold and black; it was like being sucked into a dark whirlpool -

And suddenly, they found themselves sitting on a bench at the end of the room inside the basin, a bench raised high above the others.

"We've been - sucked in, I think?" said Antheia unsurely, her voice shaking.

Breathing hard and fast, Harry looked around him. Not one of the witches and wizards in the room (and there were at least two hundred of them) was looking at him. Not one of them seemed to have noticed that two fourteen-year-old students had just dropped from the ceiling into their midst. Harry turned to the wizard next to him on the bench, and uttered a loud cry of surprise that reverberated around the silent room.

He was sitting right next to Albus Dumbledore.

"Professor!" Harry said, in a kind of strangled whisper. "I'm sorry - We didn't mean to - We were just looking at that basin in your cabinet - I - where are we?"

But Dumbledore didn't move or speak. He ignored Harry completely. Like every other wizard on the benches, he was staring into the far corner of the room, where there was a door.

"Wait!" gasped Antheia, hitting Harry so that he would turn to her. Harry gaped at her. "Harry! I think we've been brought into a memory!"

"What?"

"The shining light -" said Antheia, talking quickly, "- it was from a Pensieve! And this must be one of Dumbledore's memories."

"What's a Pensieve?"

Butterfly Effect ; H. PotterWhere stories live. Discover now